Lawlink Art Competition
Kira Fabila
About the Painting
I created this piece of artwork to symbolise the many different pathways and journeys of life. It displays many opportunities to continue the journey after reaching a destination. I believe this reflects the story of the Lawlink programme, as it demonstrates the journeys of our First Nations students, with many opportunities to choose different pathways, both in their legal profession and life in general, while staying true to their culture. As a university student myself, it is programs like this that have given me the opportunities to extend my knowledge further through industry experience, as well as support me through my studies.
About the Artist
Kiri Fabila is a proud descendant of the Djabera Djabera Tribe from Kimberly in Western Australia. In 2020, Kiri nominated the Indigenous Literacy Foundation for the Society to donate $500. To read more about the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, please see - https://www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au/
We hope that by highlighting the alumni and successes of our program that we can inspire others to join our efforts to advance First Nations Peoples within the legal profession.
For more information on how your firm can get involved with LawLink, please email cos@qls.com.au
Bethany Allen
About the Painting
This painting depicts the journeys of Indigenous legal professionals. These journeys start in homes and communities all over Australia, as represented at the base of the painting, from left to right showing desert Country out west, moving to the coast in the centre and the tropics to the right. Each travelling track represents someone’s journey from those communities, whether they have gone to university and been strengthened by the journeys of others, or whether they have made it alone. Sometimes there is a direct path, and other times there’s a few stops along the way, always supported by our communities. It’s important to me to represent these as travelling tracks, going both ways, rather than footprints, to show the enormous enrichment Indigenous legal professionals bring to their communities back home. The painting taken as a whole depicts the dawn of a new day for Indigenous people, shown in the rising of a bright sun from the warm yellow over the water, to the lighter yellow sun high in the sky. Set behind and around the sun in the sky are the footsteps of those who have gone before us. Indigenous legal professionals are guided by the strength of our Elders, ancestors and Lore, which I have painted in as the footsteps amongst the stars in the sky. These footsteps are both human and animal to represent how intrinsically linked Country and all its inhabitants are, and the role that Country’s animals have in our Dreaming and how we teach our Lore. The journeys lead to the Meeting circle in the centre, where they meet with our Indigenous brothers and sisters already living within the legal system. Some of them are those whose footsteps we walk in as legal professionals, those who braved a hostile landscape and smoothed it for us to follow, and some are those who are on the other side of the law, who have been caught in a system too long designed to hold them down, not lift them up.
About the Artist
Bethany Allen is a proud descendant of the Awabakal tribe in Newcastle, New South Wales. Bethany completed a LLB/Bachelor of Arts at Bond University and graduated with a graduate diploma of legal practice on 11 June 2020. In 2020, Bethany nominated the Aboriginal Health Justice Project within the National Justice Project for the Society to donate $500. To read more about the Aboriginal Health Justice Project, please see - https://justice.org.au/what-we-do/#aboriginal-health
